August 1, 2026

An introductory survey of white-collar crime - why it happens, the statutes that reach it, and what that implies for how you document decisions.

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July 1, 2026

Colonel John Hughes-Wilson's case studies — Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Tet, Yom Kippur, the Falklands — argue that intelligence rarely fails at collection. It fails at dissemination, reception and institutional incentive.

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June 1, 2026

Akkerman and Langman reconstruct the tools of early modern intelligence - ciphers, inks, seals, locks, poisons - and show that the cycle of measure and countermeasure was already fully formed.

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May 1, 2026

An edited academic reference on how white-collar crime is defined, detected and punished across jurisdictions, and why its measurement problems shape how an organization sees its own exposure.

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April 1, 2026

Wright and Hope's account of the 1MDB scandal works best as a diligence file: banks, auditors and celebrities all took comfort from proximity and paperwork instead of verification.

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March 1, 2026

A former US Treasury special agent maps how criminal proceeds really move - mispriced trade, hawala, commodities - and why anti-money laundering regimes built around wire transfers miss most of it.

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February 1, 2026

Chris Voss teaches technique; Mickey Bergman does the job. His account of unofficial hostage diplomacy is really a manual on building a channel neither side can acknowledge.

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January 1, 2026

Lincoln filled his cabinet with the men he had beaten. Goodwin's account of managing capable dissenters is the best available case for building a senior team that argues.

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December 1, 2025

David Callahan argues that misconduct spreads where rewards are steep and detection is weak - a structural reading of cheating far more useful to risk teams than character screening.

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September 1, 2025

A defense secretary's account of forcing a vast, well-funded institution to fight the war it was actually in — and of what those decisions cost the people who carried them.

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July 1, 2025

A vice president's unapologetic account of four decades in power, read not as settled history but as one participant's contested testimony about deciding under extreme uncertainty.

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June 1, 2025

A son's account of his mother's murder, and a careful anatomy of how corruption captured the institutions of an EU member state in plain sight over a decade.

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April 1, 2025

A general and a historian survey seventy years of war and find the same failure repeated: leaders who misread a conflict at the outset and never adapt.

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March 1, 2025

Compliance says permitted; everyone in the room says wrong. Green's moral theory of white-collar crime is the most rigorous attempt to say precisely which wrong, and why it matters.

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February 1, 2025

Ric Prado ended as chief of operations in the CIA's Bin Laden unit. Strip out the biography and what remains is method: how trust is tested, and how operations are built to survive failure.

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January 1, 2025

The biggest losses in institutional finance are entirely lawful. A forensic pension investigator on fee layers, missing documents and the advisers paid to not look hard.

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November 1, 2024

A former Director of GCHQ sets out the four-part method analysts use under uncertainty: situational awareness, explanation, estimation, strategic notice. Our review of why due diligence needs all four.

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September 1, 2024

Sacked and broke in the Depression, Herbert Yardley published what American codebreakers had been reading. He took no documents, only what he knew, and it cost years.

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August 1, 2024

The former NSA and CIA director on what happens when shared facts break down. We read it for the corporate lesson: confusion as an objective, credibility as a depleting asset.

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July 1, 2024

Gavin de Becker spent a career predicting violence. His argument: the unease you cannot yet explain is data. Our review: pre-incident indicators, manufactured trust, and what they mean for diligence.

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May 1, 2024

A media lawyer's case that reputation is a defensible asset, not weather — with a hard warning that the response, especially litigation, usually does more damage than the original allegation.

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February 1, 2024

Written for investigators rather than compliance officers, Madinger's manual explains how the money actually moves: placement, layering, integration, trade-based laundering, and the net worth method that tests a stated picture.

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December 1, 2023

A seventy-five-cent accounting error at Berkeley in 1986 led Clifford Stoll to a KGB-linked intruder. The founding text of intrusion investigation, and still the best argument against ignoring small anomalies.

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October 1, 2023

“Never Split the Difference” offers an inside look into the world of high-stakes hostage negotiations, translated into tactics for personal and business use. Chris Voss, a former FBI negotiator, shares strategies that center around empathy, active listening, and tactical mirroring to sway outcomes. This book is an essential guide for anyone aiming to improve their negotiation skills and interpersonal effectiveness.

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August 11, 2023

Fraud rises when budgets tighten. Pressure goes up, headcount comes down, and controls that quietly depended on someone having spare time stop working. This weekend read sets out where exposure concentrates during a downturn and which defenses actually hold: strong internal controls, systems that flag the patterns people miss, a crisis plan written before it is needed, and a culture in which raising an anomaly is not a career risk.

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August 1, 2023

Joel Brenner sets the demand for transparency against the need for secrecy and finds that most institutions have no coherent answer to the collision. “Glass Houses” is less a privacy book than an account of what secrecy now costs, who can still maintain it, and how little of it survives in a world where nearly every action leaves a record somewhere.

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July 25, 2023

Counterparty risk is the exposure you take on from the people you transact with — their solvency, their conduct, and their own counterparties. It rarely announces itself, and it is usually priced at zero until it is not. This guide sets out what counterparty risk actually covers, where it hides in ordinary commercial relationships, and how to assess it without stalling the deal.

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July 6, 2023

Tobias Jaeger, Founder of Falcone International, recently shared his expert insight in a Forbes article authored by Senior Contributor and &Simple CEO Francois Botha about cyber-threats and how family offices can protect themselves against them.

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July 1, 2023

Intelligence work is usually written about either as thriller or as scandal. Henry A. Crumpton, a veteran officer of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, wrote neither. “The Art of Intelligence” is a practitioner’s account of how sources are recruited and run, how decisions get made on partial information, and how often the hard part is not collecting what matters but persuading anyone to act on it.

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June 29, 2023

In “Beware of deal-killers: Six common due-diligence pitfalls”, published on Canadian Family Offices, Tobias Jaeger of Falcone International names the six places family offices most often lose money: the management team, co-investors, regulatory change, third-party vendors, the deal structure itself, and cultural and language gaps. Each one is straightforward to check and routinely skipped, usually because the deal is already moving.

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June 15, 2023

ESG has moved from a reporting exercise to a due diligence question: investors, lenders, and acquirers now price environmental, social, and governance failures much as they price financial ones. That shifts the burden onto verification — whether the claims in the report survive being checked. This piece covers what ESG risk looks like in practice, and where the gap between stated policy and actual conduct tends to open.

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June 1, 2023

This month, we are delighted to feature “How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence” by David Omand as our Book of the Month. A fascinating exploration of the world of intelligence analysis, this book offers valuable insights for anyone interested in understanding the thought processes of spies and how their techniques can be applied in everyday life.

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May 23, 2023

Pre-investment due diligence is the cheapest part of any deal and the first thing compressed when a timeline tightens. As structures grow more complex, experienced investors still miss the detail that undoes the transaction — usually because nobody was given the time to look. This piece covers what proper pre-investment diligence includes, and what it costs to find out afterward instead.

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May 11, 2023

FIRAv2 is Falcone International’s online risk assessment for business leaders who want to identify and measure their own exposure before someone else does. This guide covers how to work through it, how to read the score that comes back, and how to turn the result into something your team can act on rather than a document that gets filed.

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March 20, 2023

Falcone International has launched FIRA v2, a free online risk assessment for leaders who want a structured read on their own exposure. Twenty-five questions produce a scored report that names and ranks the weak points rather than describing them in general terms, so the result is something you can act on rather than file.

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March 13, 2023

A vendor of many years began paying more than it owed, then asked for the surplus to be forwarded to accounts named nowhere in the contract. The CFO who queried it was one authorized payment away from being the person who moved the money. What we established, why sending the money back would have been the wrong move, and the warning signs any finance team can check unaided.

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March 3, 2023

Most business planning treats politics as background noise until a border closes, a currency is restricted, a sanctions list expands, or a local partner turns out to be politically exposed. Geopolitics rarely appears on a risk register, and it is one of the few risks that can invalidate an entire market entry at once. This piece covers how political change reaches the balance sheet, and what to watch for.

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February 20, 2023

As the world becomes increasingly connected, midsize businesses face new and complex security threats. Cybercriminals are always looking for new targets. Companies that aren’t prepared for these threats are at a high risk of losing sensitive data, suffering financial losses, and damaging their reputation. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most significant threats midsize businesses face and what they can do to protect themselves.

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February 10, 2023

In this white paper, we share practical strategies for private equity firms to mitigate deal execution risk, enhance governance, and protect funds and managers against internal and external threats. A high concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of people puts private equity firms under the same pressure as larger investment organizations with a higher headcount.

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